I refuse to be peed on, poked, set on fire and hugged. I'm not interested in collecting 'friends' or creating my profile. 'It's your Continental side coming out,' my British friends say, despairing of me.

It's true. The obsession with Facebook, MySpace, Friends Reunited and other social networking sites is not exclusively British, but there is far less interest in them in France, Italy, Spain and even Germany. While the average adult Briton spends 5.3 hours a month on one of these sites, the average French person spends two hours, German, 3.1, and Italian 1.8. The Ofcom report that reveals these differences concludes that the UK is ahead of its European counterparts in terms of digital trends.

True. But there is something else at play. Friendships on the Continent are far more continuous than British ones. The chopping and changing that is part of a British upbringing does not exist in Europe.

In 1970, when my father got a job in America, we moved from Rome to Washington DC. Our annual visits home made me feel like an adventurous, glamorous globetrotter. Everything in my life was new, from the house I lived in to the friends I had. My Italian friends, instead, still sat on their cycles and later their motorcycles outside the same café in the same piazza in our old neighbourhood. Part of me gloried in being the exotic one; part of me regretted that my brief visits meant strong ties were so weakened that I was no longer privy to secrets, holiday plans and couples' engagements.

Once I came to London, I discovered a network as fractured as my own. My friends had lost touch with childhood chums. By the time they started work, most had only a few friends from university who had ended up in the same town. No wonder they took so enthusiastically to Facebook and Friends Reunited.

If you're born in Torino or Toulouse, instead, you attend the state school in your neighbourhood. The typical youngster then goes on to the local polytechnic or university - living at home while doing so. (If you're Italian, there is a 70 per cent chance you'll be living with mamma and papa into your mid-thirties.) To Continental European ears, someone from Bristol going to university in Brighton, for example, sounds like an unnecessary complication.

Living within a limited geographic area makes social connections longer lasting. The friends you played with when you were five will be around when you are in secondary school and writing your essays at university. By the time you start working, even if you move home, your social web is a strong, supportive one. Facebook friends may offer to pee on you, but isn't that just pathetic? When, with friendships that go back a long way, you can have the real thing.

Cash for answers

Not long ago, I ventured in to the newsroom of Channel 4 News. In keeping with the channel's anti-establishment attitude, it is open-plan, with presenters such as Jon Snow, Alex Thomson and Krishnan Guru-Murthy sitting next to the back-room staff.

I was there in the run-up to its 7pm start, and you could practically see the adrenaline. Journalists and editors rushed, barked, and gesticulated in their frenzied attempt to entice guests onto the programme to discuss the Labour party donor scandal that was obsessing the country at the time.

It turned out that television offers great opportunities for bribery itself. Jon Snow was calling out to his colleagues: '£25 if you can get me a Labour MP!' '£25 to anyone who can get Matthew Taylor!'

'He did this with the cash for honours scandal,' one colleague informed me, 'and he had to raise it to £150 for a Labour MP, because no one was ready to come in.'